[rescue] The Ultimate rescue - Colossus Lives Again?

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 11:49:45AM -0800, stephen price wrote:
> http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?newsid=10659&email
> 
> Colossus was the computer used at benchley park during
> ww2 that broke the german enigma code.

Sort of. There was only one according to legend, but recently
it was revealed there were 7. At least one was at Bentchley Park,
but I don't know where the others were if they were not there.

The Enigma code was broken by several methods. One of them was
that the operators often sent the encryption key in encrypted
text, but often sent that encryption key in open text.

Another was there was a hardware error in the ones used by the
German millitary that under certain circumstances produced a
encoding that was noticably different. Colussus among other
things was used to determine what combinations produced those
errors.

At the end of the war, Churchill ordered them destroyed along
with all documentation.

BTW, the article in the link is about Dell selling Solaris. :-(

Geoff.

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